Judge — April 8, 1922 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF LIGHTNING R. CHARLES P. STEINMETZ, the electrical wizard, who has succeeded in producing and controlling lightning, should not be allowed to arrogate to private use his wonderful invention. He should at once be brought under public control. For if there is one thing this country needs it is some simple arrangement for controlling the lightning. It has been striking around too promiscuously in America for the past hundred and fifty years. Every time the people have met a great crisis the lightning has hauled off and hit someone who was sup- posed to rise and meet the crisis; but generally the light- ning hit a man whose qualifications consist of agility in getting in the way of the bolt. Consider the last two national conventions of the two major parties. If ever the lightning needed a firm hand to aim, it was those two conventions. Let us charter Dr. Steinmetz, make him a public utility, take him to the primaries this sum- mer, until he gets the range and can hit a statesman at ten miles, and then in 1924 send him into the national conventions with his thunderbolts, and “with God be the rest.” TEACHING THE YOUNG IDEA TO SHOOT BURGLAR in one of our American cities was cap- tured with a diploma from a school for burglars upon his person. We are an enterprising people. We supply every demand. And education is our national fetish. Ambitious young gentlemen who desire to earn a more or less honest living by burgling, or business, or boodling, soon easily will find a school for it. The various States support post-graduate institutions where those with the A. B. degree (say, A Burglar, A Businessman, or A Boodler) may take intensive post-graduate work at State expense. New York’s institution at Sing Sing is per- haps the best known of these institutions. DITORIAL By Wiuiam ALLEN WHITE “Generally the lightning hit a man whose qualifications consist of agility in getting in the way of the bolt.” The School for Burglars is a pioneer in criminal education, if we accept Mr. Hearst’s well-known School for Scandal; but in due course we may expect the College Yell of the Columbia or Princeton or Harvard College of Gunmen and Morons to resound through upper Broadway after the Thanksgiving game between that institution and the Yale School for Applied Swindling and Arson. In another decade the auto thief who tries to sell a hot or wet car without showing his crime school diploma and his crime craft fraternity pin will have no standing with the erudite and urbane fence who inspects his wares. Doubtless, too, our county jails will be covered with ban- ners from the various schools of cussedness and crime to give the alumnus who happens in-a clubby, homey feeling. Class mottoes like “Forge Ahead” for the pen- man, “The Bills Are Green Afar Off” for the counter- feiters’ College men, “In the Midst of Life We Are in Dutch” for the graduates of the Scoundrels’ University, or “Labor Hominy Winks At” for the Chemists’ and Bootleggers’ Cornfield Colleges, will adorn the walls of our jails and give the places an air of bookish serenity. When America goes in for education she goes both a-foot and a-horseback. comicbooks.com